NYT: “Facebook, the social network service that started in a Harvard dorm room just six years ago, is growing at a dizzying rate around the globe, surging to nearly 500 million users, from 200 million users just 15 months ago. – It is pulling even with Orkut in India, where only a year ago, Orkut was more than twice as large as Facebook. In the last year, Facebook has grown eightfold, to 8 million users, in Brazil, where Orkut has 28 million. … Now about 70 percent of Facebook’s users are outside the United States. And while the number of users in the United States doubled in the last year, to 123 million, according to comScore, the number more than tripled in Mexico, to 11 million, and it more than quadrupled in Germany, to 19 million.”

TC: “It is an ambitious undertaking. But will AOL’s take on lifestreaming be compelling enough to keep existing members from leaving? And more importantly, will it be compelling enough to attract new members from eleswhere on the Web?”

Mashable: “AOL and Bebo have a huge audience and in many ways a better, more mainstream take on an idea that has proven successful so far with early adopters. Will it be enough to get the masses into social aggregation and prove that AOL didn’t massively overpay for Bebo? Probably only if tens of millions of people cling to it, versus the hundreds of thousands that use existing social aggregators.”

RWW: “Clearly, Bebo is trying to differentiate itself from other social networks by becoming more of an aggregator. Thanks to Bebo’s SocialInbox, you could already aggregate your friends’ updates on other services, even if they aren’t Bebo members. Bebo also allows you to check your Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and AOL Mail accounts from within the service.”